The juniors' committee would like to invite all interested juniors (http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/Management/Boards/Juniors/index.html) to put forth their name as a candidate for the position of junior representative for the ALICE Collaboration Board. Jan-Fiete will be stepping down as one of our three junior representatives at the upcoming ALICE week in March 2014.

Bangladesh has signed an agreement with CERN for scientific research to facilitate professional development and research skills of researchers, scientists, engineers and students from research organizations and universities across the country. The agreement would also pave the way for new scientific practices for nuclear scientists, research organizations and university students.

Marc started his career at CEA in 1978 as a superior technician in mechanical devices and structures. He was involved very early in the construction of wire chambers for particle physics in the NA4 MUON experiment at CERN.

In 1980, his knowledge and know-how in various domains from gaseous detectors, composite materials, gas supply, a.o, allowed him to participate in the construction of a large drift chamber of ‘JADE’ type for GSI Darmstadt to the construction of another spherical wire chamber for LURE at ORSAY.

Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world and nowadays is a valuable starting point for most inquiries. It started in 2001 as a user-edited web encyclopedia where everyone could submit or review an article. Following a “wiki-“ logic, material uploaded in Wikipedia (articles, media etc) is edited in a collaborative way without any strict chain of editing authority.

The ALICE Thesis Award committee is pleased to announce the two winners of the ALICE best thesis award for 2013. Every year, the committee selects two thesis, one for the best physics thesis award and one for the best technical thesis award.

The quality of the thesis submitted this year was very high, making the task of the committee both interesting and challenging!

The two thesis that have been selected among the strong competition are:

In the past few years, ALICE has published a wealth of scientific results deepening our understanding of the Quark Gluon Plasma and strong interactions and showing how exciting is the field of heavy-ion physics at the LHC.

This is also reflected in the number of students who decide every year to pursue a career with ALICE and apply for a PhD.

In this issue of ALICE MATTERS we focus on Xianguo Lu and Rongrong Ma who recently submitted their thesis following their research with ALICE.